KNOWN FOR Cooking her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I" in one year -- and keeping a blog of the "Julie/Julia Project." After the project, she quit her "dead-end secretarial job" for a 9/11-related government agency (which she never identifies) and wrote a sex-and-profanity-laced memoir called "Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen."

The 33-year-old author and Texas native, who will be in Durham this Friday to read from the paperback version of her book, does often write in her pajamas (as it says in her book jacket bio), but said she was wearing jeans for an early morning interview from her apartment in Long Island City, N.Y., with food editor Susan Houston.

Q - You said you gained about 20 pounds during the Julie/Julia project because of all the rich French foods. Have you been able to lose most of it?

A - Slowly but surely. That last 10 pounds or so is kind of tough. My husband, Eric, has given me great moral support. He's in training for the Beaujolais Nouveau Marathon in France, which is just an excuse to drink. They run and drink, so it works out nicely.

A - They came to it for different reasons. There were people my age and younger who identified with the desperate odyssey aspect of it. And there were people who saw that what I was trying to do was to take a handhold of my life in a way that was more intuitive than practical. They knew it before I did.

Q - There's also the fact that you were launching your project about a year after the terrorist attacks, and that you were writing from New York. Do you think more people paid attention to you because of that?

A - That was a particular time in the country and in New York's history where a lot of people were saying that the status quo doesn't make sense anymore. It shook a lot of people up.

So part of my thinking was "Why should I be afraid to do this when the world is so uncertain?" I wound up making choices that I might not have otherwise, so it definitely had some effect, for sure. But I hate to kind of overemphasize it. At the same time, my story is very much a New York story and people were a little more open to seeing what the average New Yorker's life was like.

A - When I finished the blog, I had a party in New York and invited everyone to come to this bar in the Village and quite a few people showed up, about 30. And some were calling the bar because they were in Nashville or whatever. On my hardback book tour, I got the chance to meet several of my greatest supporters. There was one named Granny-something in Seattle who introduced herself to me and I cried. She had a wonderful sense of humor, wisdom and sweetness, and it was a really moving experience for me. I hope to meet more the next time around.

A - No, I didn't. And that reminds me of an interesting thing about the way people reacted to the book. In the UK, the reviews were much more solidly positive, because they are not familiar with Julia Child. But here people didn't like seeing Julia Child and the f-word in the same sentence. In the UK, they were able to see it more as a self-empowering way for a woman to change her life. Food is not the subject of the book. Food is just the route that I took.

Q - The subtitle of the book changed from the hardback to the paperback. Now it's called "Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously." Why is that?

A - That was actually something I was worried about the hardback -- that people would think it was a cookbook. So I think we agreed with the paperback to retitle it so there's no "recipe" in the title. I had objected initially to any chick-lit-y look to the book. I dreaded the comparison to "Bridget Jones." But that's a pretty [expletive] good book, so I think I was being a bit of a snob.

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